The French Revolution has been a curiously unexamined subject of late, at least if one takes the entire decade from the fall of the Bastille in July 1789 to Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état of November 1799. There have been only two major histories since Simon Schama’s Citizens was published 15 years ago. Now Jeremy D. Popkin, a history professor at the University of Kentucky, has triumphantly filled the gap with A New World Begins, a well-written, profoundly researched work that has the reader eagerly turning the pages despite knowing pretty well how the main characters’ stories are likely to end (i.e., with decapitation).
One reason that few have attempted so herculean a task is the nouns. The reader needs to be guided through a bewildering array of impossible-to-escape terms: the Convention, Jacobins, September Massacres, Indulgents, National Assembly, Girondins, Committee of Public Safety, Cordeliers Club, Festival of the Federation, Montagnards, Cult of the Supreme Being, Paris sections, Hébertistes, Vendée Uprising, levée en masse, Terror, Thermidorean Reaction, Directory, Fructidor, Brumaire coup, and so on. Popkin manages this superbly while keeping the reader interested in the personalities who were often driven by what the young revolutionary Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just called “the force of things that perhaps led us to do things that we did not foresee.” A New World Begins makes clear that all sides in the Revolution conformed to that iron rule of history, the Law of Unintended Consequences.
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